Annelise Fiedler came running outside of her home to see what the racket was, she thought she may have heard gunfire. Next door, she saw her next door neighbor Sara McMeen standing over her baby. Fiedler asked McMeen if everything was ok.
“She looked at me and said, ‘No, everything is not all right,’” Fiedler told The Associated Press. At that point McMeen shot the baby, 10 month old Maggie Warren to death while Fiedler fled for her life.
Authorities are not talking about the murder suicide which claimed five lives, but neighbors are describing a horror scene, with dead bodies visable from their windows. Among the dead were McMeen, her boyfriend Daniel Warren, and her three children. Authorities are also keeping mum on a mo0tive.
One neighbor described waiting for his own child’s school bus and hearing two short bursts of 6 shots each.
Neighbor Dave Melton rushed to his house after his wife had called him completely hysterical. She could see McMeen’s backyard from her window. “The kids are dead,” she told him.
No one knows what happened in this small Illinois farming community, which only numbers 117 residents. McMeen and her family had recently moved there and neighbors said she and her boyfriend had usually kept mostly to themselves. Other neighbors said the kids would play together and they always seems happy.
The entire community is now trying to make sense of the carnage and struggling with how to explain it to their kids. How could this happen and why would McMeen snap and kill her whole family?
